No Arabic abstract
We consider a bipartite scenario where two parties hold ensembles of $1/2$-spins which can only be measured collectively. We give numerical arguments supporting the conjecture that in this scenario no Bell inequality can be violated for arbitrary numbers of spins if only first order moment observables are available. We then give a recipe to achieve a significant Bell violation with a split many-body system when this restriction is lifted. This highlights the strong requirements needed to detect bipartite quantum correlations in many-body systems device-independently.
Contemporary understanding of correlations in quantum many-body systems and in quantum phase transitions is based to a large extent on the recent intensive studies of entanglement in many-body systems. In contrast, much less is known about the role of quantum nonlocality in these systems, mostly because the available multipartite Bell inequalities involve high-order correlations among many particles, which are hard to access theoretically, and even harder experimentally. Standard, theorist- and experimentalist-friendly many-body observables involve correlations among only few (one, two, rarely three...) particles. Typically, there is no multipartite Bell inequality for this scenario based on such low-order correlations. Recently, however, we have succeeded in constructing multipartite Bell inequalities that involve two- and one-body correlations only, and showed how they revealed the nonlocality in many-body systems relevant for nuclear and atomic physics [Science 344, 1256 (2014)]. With the present contribution we continue our work on this problem. On the one hand, we present a detailed derivation of the above Bell inequalities, pertaining to permutation symmetry among the involved parties. On the other hand, we present a couple of new results concerning such Bell inequalities. First, we characterize their tightness. We then discuss maximal quantum violations of these inequalities in the general case, and their scaling with the number of parties. Moreover, we provide new classes of two-body Bell inequalities which reveal nonlocality of the Dicke states---ground states of physically relevant and experimentally realizable Hamiltonians. Finally, we shortly discuss various scenarios for nonlocality detection in mesoscopic systems of trapped ions or atoms, and by atoms trapped in the vicinity of designed nanostructures.
Current understanding of correlations and quantum phase transitions in many-body systems has significantly improved thanks to the recent intensive studies of their entanglement properties. In contrast, much less is known about the role of quantum non-locality in these systems. On the one hand, standard, theorist- and experimentalist-friendly many-body observables involve correlations among only few (one, two, rarely three...) particles. On the other hand, most of the available multipartite Bell inequalities involve correlations among many particles. Such correlations are notoriously hard to access theoretically, and even harder experimentally. Typically, there is no Bell inequality for many-body systems built only from low-order correlation functions. Recently, however, it has been shown in [J. Tura et al., Science 344, 1256 (2014)] that multipartite Bell inequalities constructed only from two-body correlation functions are strong enough to reveal non-locality in some many-body states, in particular those relevant for nuclear and atomic physics. The purpose of this lecture is to provide an overview of the problem of quantum correlations in many-body systems - from entanglement to nonlocality - and the methods for their characterization.
We present a method to show that low-energy states of quantum many-body interacting systems in one spatial dimension are nonlocal. We assign a Bell inequality to the Hamiltonian of the system in a natural way and we efficiently find its classical bound using dynamic programming. The Bell inequality is such that its quantum value for a given state, and for appropriate observables, corresponds to the energy of the state. Thus, the presence of nonlocal correlations can be certified for states of low enough energy. The method can also be used to optimize certain Bell inequalities: in the translationally invariant (TI) case, we provide an exponentially faster computation of the classical bound and analytically closed expressions of the quantum value for appropriate observables and Hamiltonians. The power and generality of our method is illustrated through four representative examples: a tight TI inequality for 8 parties, a quasi TI uniparametric inequality for any even number of parties, ground states of spin-glass systems, and a non-integrable interacting XXZ-like Hamiltonian. Our work opens the possibility for the use of low-energy states of commonly studied Hamiltonians as multipartite resources for quantum information protocols that require nonlocality.
A recent experiment reported the first violation of a Bell correlation witness in a many-body system [Science 352, 441 (2016)]. Following discussions in this paper, we address here the question of the statistics required to witness Bell correlated states, i.e. states violating a Bell inequality, in such experiments. We start by deriving multipartite Bell inequalities involving an arbitrary number of measurement settings, two outcomes per party and one- and two-body correlators only. Based on these inequalities, we then build up improved witnesses able to detect Bell-correlated states in many-body systems using two collective measurements only. These witnesses can potentially detect Bell correlations in states with an arbitrarily low amount of spin squeezing. We then establish an upper bound on the statistics needed to convincingly conclude that a measured state is Bell-correlated.
Quantum state tomography (QST) is the gold standard technique for obtaining an estimate for the state of small quantum systems in the laboratory. Its application to systems with more than a few constituents (e.g. particles) soon becomes impractical as the effort required grows exponentially in the number of constituents. Developing more efficient techniques is particularly pressing as precisely-controllable quantum systems that are well beyond the reach of QST are emerging in laboratories. Motivated by this, there is a considerable ongoing effort to develop new characterisation tools for quantum many-body systems. Here we demonstrate Matrix Product State (MPS) tomography, which is theoretically proven to allow the states of a broad class of quantum systems to be accurately estimated with an effort that increases efficiently with constituent number. We first prove that this broad class includes the out-of-equilbrium states produced by 1D systems with finite-range interactions, up to any fixed point in time. We then use the technique to reconstruct the dynamical state of a trapped-ion quantum simulator comprising up to 14 entangled spins (qubits): a size far beyond the reach of QST. Our results reveal the dynamical growth of entanglement and description complexity as correlations spread out during a quench: a necessary condition for future beyond-classical performance. MPS tomography should find widespread use to study large quantum many-body systems and to benchmark and verify quantum simulators and computers.